So as I waded through the Sunday papers yesterday morning, sipping my tea in the garden, ploughing through the commentaries, speculation, opinions, exclusive tell-tales, official verdicts, non-official thoughts, interviews, money enquiries, family trees, discographies, and every other kind of article about Michael jackson, I read about something which may have made larger news had Michael Jackson’s death not been so dominating…

Richard Dawkins is opening a specialist school camp for atheists… I much the same way organised religions have their own type of summer camps and school trip-type projects, the author of The God Delusion is doing the same for athesim.  The students aged from 8-17 will be taught theories of evolution and so on… makes for some interesting reading.

My students and Inner Circle members know that I laugh a lot at, quote the odd passage from and am a big fan of South Park. i tend to agree with the take of the creators very often and love the way they wrap the issues in humour, sattire and ridiculousness.

You see, Dawkins andsome of his peers consider religion to be the root of all evil, and have a utopian ideal of a blissful world without any religions and everybody is an atheist. They openly state the belief that wars and violence are just going to vanish if we have no religion.

I am all for kids being able to get a different perspective on things… Though I think some of the espoused notions are wrong… Similarly, I think the same about aspects of many religions…

In a fairly recent two-part South Park episiode entitled “Go God Go” demonstrates in their own unique way, that perhaps religion is not actually the root cause of all the violence in the world… Perhaps it is an excuse.

Just because many of the wars in the history of human kind have been caused by and justified by religion does not necessarily mean that, without religion, these wars would not have occurred, does it?

I mean, I know many people that argue that the true root cause of all human violence is maleness, not religion or anything else that men happen to use as an excuse or cause. They’d argue that men fight, because they are violent and it is part of male human nature to fight. The episode of South park I mentioned went with this idea that even if you remove religion, men just find another excuse to fight.

In that episode, Cartman finds himself in a future world where, thanks to Richard Dawkins, everyone is an atheist and there is no religion. Dawkins has essentially saved the world from religion.

Yet there is interminable violence and wars, because different groups of atheist men (and otters) fight each other over what to call themselves. They fight over which of them has the best name as desired by their messiah from history, Richard Dawkins… The irony is hilarious. Non-religion becomes like an organised religion in itself!

The men do find other reasons to wage wars against each other.

There are many wars fought out of differences in clans, beliefs and all sorts if peer through history and even if you look at what is going on in Somalia today and what has happened in a variety of places… I have had my beef with organised religion from time to time, especially many of the old-fashioned opinions of and attitudes to my beloved field of hypnosis, but I am not going to let them take the entire blame for war… surely, evolutionary theorists should be looking at the evolution of wars, conflict and fighting too, no?